One of the greatest challenges of the 21st century is to understand how the human brain works in health and disease. According to our general model and hypothesis, complex behavior is mapped at the level of multi-focal neural systems rather than specific anatomical sites, giving rise to brain-behavior relationships that are both localized and distributed. Understanding how the human brain works requires knowledge of this functional neuroanatomy; namely, """"""""what"""""""" type of processing is performed, """"""""where"""""""" different processing areas are, and """"""""when"""""""" temporal processing is organized between distributed areas. Previous event-related potential (ERP) and behavioral studies have demonstrated that the mismatch negativity (MMN) ERP response is closely tied to (a) human auditory attention, (b) pre-attentive processing of complex tone patterns, and (c) speech perception. Though a comprehensive theory on MMN-cognition interrelationships has been advanced, the precise neurophysiological underpinnings of this electrophysiological response have remained unresolved to date. Here, we propose to utilize our spatiotemporal brain imaging techniques (including fMRI, MEG/EEG) to unravel the neural underpinnings of the MMN. Our results will be used to develop both the theory and a computational model of MMN, working in collaboration with our colleagues at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Benefits of the present study are: (1) elucidation of the neural mechanisms underlying human pre-attentive change detection within the human auditory cortical areas, (2) disclosing the neural substrate of involuntary attention in the auditory modality, which may help to guide future clinical research into the attentional deficits observed in, e.g., schizophrenia or ADHD, (3) elucidation of the cortical organization of processing of complex sounds in the human brain, and (4) measurement of the neural operations underlying processing of elementary speech sounds(phonemes).
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